Meat Loaf Again?
VH1's upcoming slate of musical biopics
presented some weighty issues. Finding the right hefty thespian
to play Marvin Lee Aday, a.k.a. Meat Loaf, took forever and a
day. After failing to snag Philip Seymour Hoffman (Magnolia) or
Jack Black (High Fidelity), director Jim McBride (Great Balls of
Fire) saw more than 100 prospective Loafs before settling on W.
Earl Brown, who played the mentally challenged brother in There's
Something About Mary. There were no national open casting calls
on the Meat Loaf project like those VH1 held for their
now-shooting Monkees biopic: ''That would've been too much craft
service,'' kids Michael Larkin, VH1's VP for motion pictures for
television. The network is also about to cast a Heart biopic,
which raises its own weight issues — Ann Wilson's size struggles
having been key to their Behind the Music episode. But rather
than pad an actress for the later years, the Heart story will
wrap up circa their '84 comeback.
Oscar (Not Oscar)
Seven years ago, the group Was (Not Was)
parted ways in the middle of making their fifth album. But
(unrelated) collaborators Don Was and David Was have kissed, made
up, and resumed work on the long-abandoned tapes — bits of which
were actually premiered throughout the Oscar telecast, of all
places. Don, the show's musical codirector, employed instrumental
excerpts from the Was (Not Was) album-in-progress as bumper music
before and after commercials. Says David, ''Apparently, phones lit
up with inquiries from a funk-thirsty America desperate to know
what that brand-old sound was, so we are having our lawyers sort
out the dusty-ass contracts to see which of the three remaining
[record labels] wants our services.'' In what was surely an Oscar
first, Don also hired David to sit in with the pit band and
scratch old albums like Jose Jiminez the Astronaut and Don Adams
Live on a turntable during winners' walks to the dais. Says
David, ''I even scratched a Billy Crystal disc, Mahvelous, I'd
found at a garage sale that morning for 25 cents. Billy signed it
as himself and Sammy Davis Jr., but I didn't tell him how cheap
it sold for.''
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